quote:The Journal News is at the center of controversy yet again. Now a hacker group has broken into the newspaper's database and is disseminating the names, addresses, and passwords of thousands of the Journal News' customers.

In December, the Westchester, New York area paper released the names and addresses of thousands of New York's legal gun owners, then threatened to publish even more in the near future.

After the local New York paper published the names and addresses of gun owners in Rockland County in an online interactive map, bloggers responded by posting the names and addresses of the employees of the Journal News.

The paper then hypocritically hired armed guards to patrol its offices over what it claimed were "threatening" emails it had received.

The Journal News also announced late in December that it would continue politicizing the names and addresses of New York gun owners and began the process of obtaining the names and addresses of gun owners in nearby Putnam County. But county officials there have balked, refusing to give the paper the requested information.

"There is the rule of law, and there is right and wrong and the Journal News is clearly wrong," Putnam County Clerk Dennis Sant said in a statement. "I could not live with myself if one Putnam pistol permit holder was put in harm's way, for the sole purpose of selling newspapers." In the latest development in this tit-for-tat invasion of privacy, a group of hackers have announced that they've broken into the Journal News' subscriber database. The group is sending the database of customers' names, addresses, and passwords to anyone that requests it.

Some of this database appears to be on the file sharing site called Pastebin, and many are tweeting about the release of information.

We here at Breitbart News will not post the names, addresses, and passwords of the customers of the Journal News, as that information is not public record.